Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 88656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Yeah, he was strong alright. He was also standing too damn close to me. It was hard to breathe with someone standing so close.
“Remember what you told me the first time we met?” I asked. I don’t know what possessed me, but I reached out and flattened my palm against his abs. “You told me you don’t get a body like this by eating fast food, and you’re absolutely right. I don’t want to bring you down to my level, Kage. I want you to bring me up.”
He shifted. I felt the ripple of muscle through the fabric of his shirt, the heat of his skin, and I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. Something was happening in my shorts. That old familiar tingle and tighten, the purely physical reaction to skin on skin contact, made infinitely worse by the fact that I’d been celibate for way too long. I was getting hard.
If I didn’t get a woman soon, I was going to have to keep a respectable distance from Michael Kage. Definitely no more sparring, because if he ever noticed what was happening to me every time he touched me, he might think—
Oh, God.
The touch was too personal. It wasn’t just a friendly touch. There was a wave of desire rolling up behind it, and I think he felt it, too. How could he not?
I moved my hand, meaning only to let go of him, but my fingers skated delicately over his belly in the process. He shuddered and grabbed my wrist, yanking down and back, using a mini arm drag to pull me flush against him.
“What are you doing?” he grated, his voice low and dangerous.
“I— I don’t—” Stuttering was not helping my case. I finally looked up into his eyes, impossibly green and glittering with some emotion I couldn’t read. Whatever that emotion was, it terrified me.
He secured my hand behind him and used his hips to back me hard against the fridge. The glass liquor bottles jangled inside the door, and the cracker box fell over onto the counter with a thud.
Kage was either about to kiss me or beat the utter fuck out of me, and I was pretty sure I wanted the first but deserved the second. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for a reaction that never came. Instead, I heard the spinning roll of a glass bottle making its way across the counter, just before it crashed to the floor.
My eyes flew open. Red wine gushed up our legs, splashing onto Kage’s white shirt and staining it. Sticky liquid puddled around my bare feet, and something stung the sensitive skin on the top of my left foot. I sucked in a breath.
“Fuck!” Kage yelled instinctively, glancing down at the carnage. “Your feet. Don’t move, there’s glass everywhere.”
He squatted and wrapped an arm around my thighs, hoisted me up and cinched my legs against his ribs. I grabbed onto his broad shoulders, feeling the power there. He looked down and surveyed the floor, stepping gingerly back before tiptoeing across the kitchen floor like he was negotiating a minefield. He wiped his sneakers on the very edge of the carpet before making his way all the way across the room and lowering me to the bed.
“Don’t move,” he told me again. “I’ll be right back.”
I watched him disappear into the bathroom, still in shock from the bottle disaster, and even more from what had happened before.
Kage returned with a warm wet cloth and a folded tissue and dropped to one knee on the floor in front of me. He pulled my left foot onto his knee, and that’s when I noticed the shard of glass slicking out of the top of my foot.
“Damn,” I said. “I didn’t even know that was there.”
He snatched the glass out of my foot and set it on the bedside table, then used the cloth to soothe the spot. After a moment, he cleaned the wine from the rest of my foot and moved on to the other one. A tiny rivulet of blood trickled from the hole the glass had left in my foot, and he staunched it by pressing the square of tissue against it.
“Don’t worry, it’s not deep,” he said. “It may sting a little, but it shouldn’t bleed much.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I told him, embarrassed. “I’m not a little kid.”
“I don’t mind. I’m used to taking care of boo-boos.” He reached up to ruffle my hair, like I truly was a kid in need of nursing. “The difference is, they’re usually my own.”
He stood up and carried the rag and tissue to the bathroom, and I heard him washing his hands. I looked down at my foot and saw that he was right. It had already stopped bleeding, though the skin was a little red and swollen around the gouge.